This is a topic that can be addressed in several ways because in various ways, the Maya kept some very accurate records, which would lead to establishing their credibility, but at the same time, according to Dr. Mark Van Stone, the author of our book for iPad, 2012: Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, they also are known to have made errors and just left them in the stone glyph monuments that are

strewn across Mesoamerica. Local leaders also just reset days in their calendar to coincide with a leader’s agenda.

In today’s video, an excerpt from our book for iPad, Dr. Susan Milbrath of the University of Florida, talks about the accuracy of the Maya calendar and their precision in tracking the skies.

In the book for iPad, pages 76-81, Dr. Van Stone points out that the Maya Haab has 365.00 days. “Every four years, it drifts another day out of synchronization with the tropical year of 365.2122 days, as well as the Siderial year of 365.2564 days.”

The Maya had no leap year. So over time, things got out of whack and their leaders made adjustments accordingly along the way.

As Dr. Van Stone says, “Claiming that the Maya Calendar was ‘more accurate’ than the Gergorian implies, of course, that they had access to knowledge superior to our own…. This is just not true. The simply used tools they had at hand, and their persistent intelligence, to do the best they could.”

You can read more about the Maya in our book for iPad by going to MVS2012.comand downloading version 1.1 of the book.

The other day I was asked by a friend, “Do people really believe in that stuff about the Maya?” My answer was an emphatic: YES!

There have been many times in 2012 when I have witnessed the intensity of those who believe that Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end for us all.

After publishing a news release announcing the design of Dr. Mark Van Stone’s book for iPad, 2012: Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, I began receiving regular phone calls from one man. Each call was a lengthy one-sided discussion where he alerted me to all the facts associated with the impending doom we all face in just 19 days now. He ran off a litany of names of scientists and government agencies he’d been in contact with. He had factual information he’d uncovered and had called NASA about it. Clearly they had decided that the only way to get him to leave them alone was to send him somewhere else. They did. They apparently told him to send his package of information to the White House. Since this was sensitive information, they apparently told him that he should write “TOP SECRET” on the outside of the envelope and “underline it twice,” so that the Obama administration would know, with the double underlining, that in fact, it truly was classified information. The package supposedly was sent as described…..

Ispos Poll 2012

In May 2012, the polling firm Ispos released a study showing that “one in ten (10%) believe ‘the Mayan calendar, which some say ‘ends’ in 2012, marks the end of the world’ and another one in ten (8%) admit they ‘have been experiencing anxiety or fear because the world is going to end in 2012.’” Supposedly this was a random sample of more than 16,200 people in 21 countries around the globe. So do people really believe this stuff? The answer is an emphatic YES! With 7 billion people on the planet and 10 percent walking around believing stuff, I’d submit to you, that’s a pretty substantial number of fokes.

But as we have begun to outline here on TheWondersExpedition.com, through consultations with Dr. Mark Van Stone, one of the world’s leading scholars on the subject, all we really know is that the Maya Calendar is set to roll over like the odometer in your car on Dec. 21, 2012, and nothing more. Now there were predictions that an obscure god they referred to as Bolon Yokte was going to come down to Earth and put on a costume, that’s about all that was really said.

Tortuguero Monument 6

As an exclusive today, we’re posting a video of Dr. Barb MacLeod in Austin, Texas, reading from Tortuguero Monument 6 which is one of the only two monuments that have been found from the Maya that even mention 2012. So watch our video from Dr. Mark Van Stone’s book for iPad. And then go buy our book because this is just the tip of the amazing information you can find in this one of a kind book made exclusively for iPad by ClaxtonCreative.com.

Dr. Barb MacLeod reads Tortuguero Monument 6

This is the main text that mentions 2012. Watch this one-of-a-kind video. Each glyph that makes it up is pulled from the portion of the monument where it was carved and you can get a better view of it enlarged while Dr. MacLeod is interpreting its meaning. Listen closely and please, please let us know if you hear anywhere in this reading where it says the world is going to end in 19 days.

According to some predictions, the Dec. 21, 2012 end of times is slated for 11:11 a.m. UTC. Or about 6:11 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States.

We talked earlier in the year with a man who swore on whatever data he’d assembled that death was due to come at noon on Dec. 21. Out of concern for upsetting him, we didn’t ask which time zone he meant. At one point we just assumed that as it struck noon around each time zone, people would just fall out. It’s been that kind of a year dealing with some of the nonsense that’s come about.

From our discussions and work with Dr. Mark Van Stone, who has published as a book for iPad–2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, there is nothing in Maya prophecy that establishes a time for our passing. And if you really think about it, if there was such an ending predicted by the Maya, there’s not, it would most likely be the Central time zone, which closely mirrors those in Mesoamerica. But we digress.

One of the favorite Maya Myth predictions seems to be the whole concept of an impending galactic alignment where the earth is going to cross the galactic plane and we’re all going to be sucked into this vortex and die.

The greatest problem with this prediction is that according to diagrams you will see in this video, the Earth is actually going to miss the center of the galaxy by about three degrees on Dec. 21, 2012. Whoops!

All this is really enough to make one wonder how something like this even gets started. So many predictions have been projected upon the Maya. Yes, they were great mathematicians and even astronomers, but so much of what people are talking about these next 24 days never even entered into their consciousness. Makes one wonder what people 1,000 years from now will be saying about us, doesn’t it?

But as we begin these next 30 days of Maya Myth debunking, we thought it was important to revisit this subject once more because as we get closer and closer to Dec. 21, 2012, you just know some TV producer extraordinaire is going to snag an image of the Aztec Calendar Stone off the Internet and toss it into a story about the Maya Calendar.

Original Aztec Stone of the Sun on display in the museum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Aztec Calendar Stone came along almost 500 years after the demise of the Maya. In fact, the Maya never even saw it.

There are five creations featured in the Aztec Calendar Stone. The Maya only believed in four creations; we are in the fourth and they don’t call for a fifth.

So if you see a news story, read a blog post, or see a book or magazine promoting its knowledge about the Maya and what they predicted as it relates to Dec. 21, 2012 and you see a photo of the Aztec Calendar Stone, we urge you caution in believing anything else you hear from the source. Because for starters, they’ve got that part wrong and there’s no telling what else is also in err…..

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There was no known archeoastronomic calendar date associated with yesterday’s release of the Adobe Creative Cloud CS6 Suite of products–May 11, 2012–but after going through clips we recently shot of Dr. Anthony Aveni of Colgate, I’m sure, as he would say, we could find some 2012 enthusiast to “cherry pick” some points of significance to highlight the day.

For our part, we’ll just stick to what we know for fact–Using Adobe’s Prelude CS6 is making it easier for us to comb through the multiple hours of video we shot at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology meeting in Memphis in mid-March and help us catalog the materials in such a way that it’s going to greatly expedite the time we spend actually editing the content for the upcoming release of Dr. Mark Van Stone‘s interactive book for the iPad–2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya.

Dr. Anthony Aveni as he discusses the recent announcement about Maya ruins

We also are proud to say that we have video of Dr. Aveni talking about the discovery announced Thursday and the findings being released in Science magazine and National Geographic. When can you see it? When we get the book done and loaded up in iTunes of course! Which thanks to the release of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite this past weekend, will be very, very soon.

I will say this though–if the Maya had been using these new Adobe Creative Cloud tools to tell their stories, make their glyphs and leave us hints/no hints about Dec. 21, 2012, no one would be worried about it being the end of the world. In fact, they’d be like me and really hoping it doesn’t end. I want to be still playing with these programs on Dec. 22nd!

We also have a couple BIG announcements coming about the release of the book. But more about that later.

Prelude has been a great addition to our editing and creative tools. Now we need to get back to using them!

We have come to accept the fact that it’s REALLY, REALLY HARD to believe much of anything that’s on the Internet–including this most important of points–about representations of the Maya Calendar anywhere from stock trading commercials to the breadth of the Google Image page on “Maya Calendar.” The problem here is this–this is NOT the Maya Calendar–it’s the Aztex “Calendar Stone,” and came after the fall of the Maya–the ancient Maya never even saw this rock!

The Aztec Calendar Stone--Not the Mayan Calendar

This image, a circular stone, also known as the Altar of Axayacatl, features eight triangular sun rays, the Sun GodTonatiuh in the middle sporting a tongue of flint. Surrounding him, per Dr. Mark Van Stone’s book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, is a “giant X-shaped date 4-Ollin, the date of the latest creation“–there are five that were believed by the Aztecs to have happened over time.

Now in all fairness, the Aztec apparently did rely on the teachings and beliefs of the Maya as they came up with their own creation stories. There are similar dates and what Van Stone refers to as a “rhetorical structure” to the Maya’s famed Popol Vuh, record of creation. But as Dr. Van Stone points out in his book, “The Aztecs either received a corrupted account of the Maya Creation, or deliberately changed it,” because they have significant differences, at least in the minds of scholars.

Beware of 2012 Meme Exaggerations and Errors of Fact

We say all this to emphasize that as the hype about Dec. 21, 2012 builds between now and the December Solstice, it’s important to remember that relying on information just posted by anyone on the 2012 Meme can be as reliable as–the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines. The images were populated by people who posted information and did so erroneously. Then someone else came along, grabbed an image of the Mayan calendar, stuck it on their website, in a TV commercial or a magazine or newspaper story, and all of the sudden, the Aztecs were converted to Maya and a major historical distortion happened.

Which leads to an argument we’d like to continue some other time. Some archeologists like to pose–that even though traditions and histories weren’t written down for hundreds of years–they were still preserved orally and “vary accurately.” One certainly must wonder about the accuracy of oral stories shared for hundreds of years when the Internet has been around for 20 or so and with all our technology today, we can’t even keep the Mayan Calendar straight….. Again, that’s a conversation for another day.

Now for the REAL Maya Calendar–Check out the Madrid Codex, which certainly isn’t as colorful, sexy or some would say as “pretty” as the Aztec Calendar Stone. This is an actual drawing done by a Maya artist. Dr. Van Stone says comparing the two calendars is like “portraying the Colosseum when talking about Classical Athens.” Different countries. Different times. Different everything.

Google Madrid Codex Image Search Results

The Mayan Calendar Wheel

We also wanted to point out this representation that’s out in circulation as well. It’s often called the Mayan Calendar Wheel. Problem is? The Maya didn’t have the wheel. Now maybe they used it on kid’s toys and not with beasts of burden to transport rocks and trees and the like, but one also has to stop and think. Is it ethically right to demonstrate the concept of their calendar using this, when they didn’t employ such technology and certainly never drew it out to work like this.

Such are the discussions we’re having internally as we seek to deliver the first Interactive Book for the iPad on Dr. Mark Van Stone’s incredibly insightful book on the 2012 Meme.

What do you think? Is it poor science to use the diagram to the left to portray something they could not have done circa 800 AD in Mesoamerica?

Through some very exciting conversations of late with renowned Mayanist Dr. Mark Van Stone, we have developed a very keen understanding of what he refers to as the “projecting” of our knowledge onto an earlier society that had not discovered what we know today and instead of explaining the world through their frame of reference, seeing it AND explaining it through ours. In other words, creating a total distortion.

This is a very dangerous practice and one that often leads to the nonsense we see in shows like Ancient Aliens, where learned professors like Dr. Van Stone spend a small portion of the show giving an authoritative perspective, only to have it then clouded by a clown with big hair who says the answer has to be aliens.

But we have seen this concept of the Maya Calendar displayed in many places and even are having an internal debate on how to use it in applications being developed by our art department here in Dallas. But there’s one HUGE, ancient-pyramid-sized error in what you’re looking at.

The Maya didn’t have the wheel.

So if they didn’t have the wheel, though cyclical like ours today, their calendar did not look like this. As Dr. Van Stone has pointed out, neither does ours.

It is just this sort of thing that makes television shows like Ancient Aliens so plausible and easy to believe. And it is just this sort of thing that when it’s shown as fact, needs to be called out and explained.

We can understand why this is being used: Because today we KNOW about the wheel and because of our knowledge today, it’s easier to look back on what they didn’t know then and conceptualize. But….

Made to Stick

In their 2007 book, Made To Stick, the Hatch brothers talk about an experiment to do with tapping out the rhythm of a song. If you hear a tune in your head and you start tapping it out on the table in front of you, there’s no doubt you can be just as impressive (in your own mind) as Ringo Starr or Peter Chris from Kiss in banging it out. But without humming the tune and without saying ahead of time what it is, ask someone sitting there with you what it is you’re tapping out.

The odds are tremendously high they are not going to be able to name that tune. Why? Because they don’t have the same frame of reference about the tune in your head as you do. You are the only one who can “hear it.” Once they know what you’re tapping out, the chances improve that they might be able to say that they can hear what you’re doing, but even then….

The point is historians and archeologists often try to do this same thing when explaining what was going on in the minds of our ancient ancestors. In many cases, because some civilizations either didn’t have a written records, like those who built Stonehenge, or the Mesoamericans who had much of their work burnt and destroyed by the Conquistadors, we just don’t know. And then there are those who can sit in front of a camera with a straight face and say, “It had to be Extra Terrestrials.”

Leap Day 2012

So on Leap Day 2012, remember, there is a lot of thinking and work that went into the marking and the use of Leap Year and Leap Days. If today is your birthday, congratulations. We wish you a great day, certainly.

There is plenty of information on the Net about how we came to have a Leap Year. Julius Caesar is often given credit for adopting the Leap Year tradition in 45 BC to help the seasons catch up with the calendar once they had shifted. As you may know, the length of a year isn’t actually 365 days, it’s a little longer, so when you’ve had a couple of them go by, things start to get out of sync, and gone far enough, Dec. 25 could have drifted into another season, etc.